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Comment by tombert | Hacker News Reader

It's not perfect, but h264 is generally "pretty good", and presumably its patents should be expiring in the next few years. At that point, we will (hopefully) finally have a codec that's supported basically everywhere, has pretty decent "quality to size" ratio, and will cost nothing to license.

Of course, by that point I'm sure everyone will have moved onto HEVC or something, but a guy can dream of this utopia.

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As I have been rambling about it for years. A truly patent free Video Codec that is good enough.

I also think we could innovate on top of it. Using certain techniques form JPEG-XL, ( Royalty free and not Patent encumbered ), breaking certain limitation it had like the size of macroblock. And lots of other limitation it had in place simply because hardware at the time wont fast enough.

This could push another 30%+ Bitrate reduction. As EVC Base Profile has shown to be possible.

Or we might do it the other way round and build a video codec based on JPEG XL.

I never finished it, but during a hackathon I did try and make a codec around FLIF (which more or less merged with/morphed into JPEG XL IIRC). I didn't get too far, but it was one of those things that I didn't really understand why no one else had done it.

So I think a codec based around JPEG-XL sounds cool. Someone should do it.

FWIW we currently have this in the AV1 codec which is royalty-free and has a better quality/size ratio than h264.

AV1 looks very cool but it doesn't have nearly the level of compatibility that H264 has. H264 works out of the box on browsers, as well as having hardware support on phones and SBCs and set-top-boxes and whatnot.

AV1 might eventually get there, and that would be awesome if it does, but H264 has been around long enough to have a substantial "first mover advantage" over AV1.

Last Raspberry doesnt have H264 decode hardware, wouldnt be surprised if that becomes a trend. A lot of SBCs only support up to 1080 on h264, 4k requires h265.

Yeah, I read that, though I think the latest Raspberry Pi might be fast enough to decode h264 in software so it might be a non-issue anyway; as long as it is fast enough I think I actually prefer software decoding just because (I think) it's more platform-independent.

I think I get your point though; if the Raspberry Pi is not adding chips for native H264 decoding, set top boxes and other SBCs might drop it as well.

Fair, but that's a matter of time it seems. I think AV1 is a good bet.

Yeah, no question; H264 had a 10+ year head start and entrenched itself as part of the Blu-ray and online video sharing space. Once AV1 has similarly-largely-scoped things then it'll probably take a lot of h264's market, and it'll be royalty-free from the get-go.

I definitely want AV1 to become the "video standard to rule them all", but once H264's patents expire I think I'm also ok with it being the standard as well.

On the patents of AV1 earlier this week in Hacker News

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38083588#38088009

TL;DR It’s neither patent free nor ”patent safe”.

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